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Friday, 17 February 2017

FERGUS-ON SINGS THE BLUES

Once upon a time, we had a television that was made in our
home town – in fact, we had two. They were black-and-white portable televisions
made by Ferguson, a major employer in Gosport, Hampshire, and a division of the
enormous Thorn-EMI corporation. The cathode ray tube in one TV gave up one day,
but the other hung on for a very long time: when the on-off-volume switch fell
off, it was replaced by the end of a used chapstick, jammed into the hole to
serve for nearly a full decade. Colour television arrived in my bedroom when both
progress, and a Christmas, replaced the Ferguson with a portable Bush TV.

It turns out that this coming Monday, 20th
February, is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the closing of the Ferguson
factory, which has since become a business park. The US conglomerate Cyanamid,
once owners of brands as disparate as Old Spice and Formica, had a
pharmaceutical plant down the road, but it has since moved out, the factory
knocked down. The remaining mass employer in Gosport, apart from the Royal
Navy, is the Finnish company Huhtamaki, makers of food and drink packaging, and
formerly known as the great-sounding Sweetheart International, whose base is big
enough for them to sponsor the flowers on nearby roundabouts.

It is too easy to get sentimental about these things,
especially the jobs that are lost – I have only worked in my home town for five
months out of the last twelve years. However, the reason the last TV was
replaced was the same reason the factory closed: competition. In 1987,
Thorn-EMI sold Ferguson to Thomson, the French company that already shared production
and designs with them, but they themselves pulled out of a market where
Ferguson no longer fit.

Back when people rented TVs, because they were often too
expensive to buy, Thorn-EMI not only made the TVs, you rented and bought from
them too – their Radio Rentals, DER and Rumbelows rental businesses have since
become Bright House. Thorn-EMI also made some of the programmes you saw, owning
half of Thames Television, and all of EMI Records. Only Sony has gone as far as
this since, owning Columbia Pictures and MGM, but they don’t keep their
customers tied in to the same extent, as TVs have since become cheap enough to
buy, and throw away – no jamming in any chapsticks there.

If people are looking at bringing back industry the way we
used to have it, so long as you are able to innovate and adapt as well as any
other part of the world, and you know that the conditions are different from the
way they were, then it is certainly possible. Whether it means anyone will buy
up Gosport’s KFC drive-thru, knock it down, and build the Cyanamid factory on
top of it, is another question all together… one that has the answer, “probably
not,” unless plans for the future are being made over a bucket of chicken.